'Healthy Selfies'

Posted on 07 July 2015

After being awarded their 360 E-Safety Award from SWGfL, our partner in the UK Safer Internet Centre, the students at Ken Stimpson Community School have taken their E-Safety learning even further. They have produced a ‘Healthy Selfies Campaign’ in school. They have written a blog to tell you all about it.

Ken Stimpson Healthy Selfies Campaign

We started the healthy selfie campaign because we felt, as students, there was a problem with inappropriate selfies nationally concerning young people. We knew that we couldn’t change the mind set of all young people across the country, but could certainly try and make an impact on those in our school community. We first thought that in order to help the campaign be a success, we needed a catchy slogan that people could remember. Mr Swift ran a competition throughout school as part of Safer Internet Week, asking for tutor groups to come up with a memorable slogan that we could use. This gave teachers the opportunity to discuss online safety, the publication of images and general selfie health warnings with their tutor groups.

The winning submission we received was “Selfies Ain’t Healthy”. We really liked this idea but were also aware that the message wasn’t quite right – selfies can be healthy! So after some careful consideration, we changed it to “Keep Selfies Healthy”. We decided this would be a useful slogan for a campaign to promote against inappropriate selfies. We thought it best to implement it in the school E-Safety board that we had been working on, so we gathered some selfies of staff and students (using a selfie stick!) around the school and decided to place them on the board to demonstrate what a “healthy selfie” is. The staff and students we took selfies of were very embracing of the idea and thought that it would be a good way to raise awareness about the issues that we were trying to tackle (i.e. inappropriate selfies).

We placed all the selfies we took of staff on our E-Safety board in a location that every student will pass at least once a day, and is in the corridor that connects two buildings. This increases the amount of people that see the information we put there, impacting on more of the school population than if we placed it somewhere low key. The idea behind the staff selfies was that if students see staff taking selfies then they may think it is “less cool” to do, therefore discouraging them from doing it, but at the same time demonstrating that selfies can be fun – if they are healthy. We surrounded these pictures with information about digital footprints (“I can never get that photo back!”) and other key E-Safety messages to help drip feed the information to students.

The selfies have generated a buzz recently and staff who are included in the photos have been asked questions by students, which in turn also adds to the message we were trying to spread. There is more discussion and focus on healthier selfies then there was previously and we are also developing promotional materials for the TV screens around our school to remind people how to keep selfies healthy. We are aiming to gather some feedback from the students at our school to see how effective they think our campaign has been and continue to help educate the new students each year.

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